Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday July 02, 2012 @07:25PM
from the prepare-to-be-blacklisted dept.

New submitter freddienumber13 writes "The Australian Government has announced a review of the copyright act to look at the provisions of fair use and exceptions with a view towards considering whether or not the law has kept pace with technology and thus if further provisions are required to ensure the act remains relevant and effective."
Don't hold your breath; the committee has until November 30th, 2013 to create their report. Maybe Australians will see their Fair Use rights expanded in a time when it's in fashion to expand copyright protections.

You're new to this government thing, aren't you? In all the decades you have been reading ALRC reports, or the reports of other government appointed inquiries for that matter, when have you ever read "everything is OK as it is, and we have no recommendations?"

Read between the lines of the terms of reference. The ALRC has been asked to "to consider whether existing exceptions are appropriate and whether further exceptions should recognise fair use of copyright material..." Are existing exceptions anywhere near appropriate, say in ensuring "fair use" such as it might be understood in the US? ALRC is going to have hard time answering that in the affirmative! The further exceptions they are being asked to devise should you know. And they will...

This is another step towards harmonising our law with that of the US and for a change from all the punitive harmonisations, this will introduce some small measure of freedom. It is well known that the government has for some time wanted to introduce some kind of fair use provision into Australian copyright law. Just don't expect an overly broad one.

Country A has stricter copyright provisions than Country B.Trade group in Country B: "Oh no. We're going out of business immediately unless we get copyright provisions at least as good as Country A. Better give a little extra just to make sure we can stay in business."Wait 5 minutes after the law passes.Trade group in Country A: "Oh no. We're going out of business immediately unless we get copyright provisions at least as good as Country B. Better give a littl

You're harmonising [sic] with US spelling, why do you expect the law to remain immune?

Seriously though, the reason is the net. The late C20th and early C21st has seen IP law move into 2 related directions. Firstly attempts to reduce the risk digital communications pose to IP holders and the concomitant internationalisation of the Law. Given the position of the US as the world's major content creator (Silicon valley and Hollywood) and the decline of their "hard" manufacturing sector, it is unsurprising that (after a century of isolating themselves from the international IP scene) they have sought most vigorously to establish a regime which protects the value of their exports.

The code apocryphally dreamt up in the legal depts. of your Disneys, passed onto US negotiators at the WTO has been incorporated via instruments such as TRIPS, into the municipal law of WTO member countries. Thus similar provisions to those found the in the US DMCA, were incorporated into our copyright law via the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000 (C'th). Nor were these the last. Such is the price of membership and we are not about to drop out of the WTO any time soon..

Having imported many of the new restrictions, it is thought we ought also to access a few of the liberties. However, the decision to devise "fair use" exception must also be understood in the context of facilitating international business. Take the concrete example of some US based vendor who incorporates what is there allowable fair use content into a product which could be sold also in Australia. The dangers posed by a non-harmonised legal framework poses for such transactions ought to be obvious.

It's a price of a "free trade" agreement that doesn't let us sell you any sugar, steel, wheat or beef until 2030, and makes it no more easy to sell you any other goods and services than before it was signed. It's a dud deal signed while the clock was running out and an idiot called Vale had to come home with something or admit failure.So it's the price of keeping a promise.

Once a country has codiifed 'fair use' and established some basics, it actually becomes easier to lobby to expand those basics. Not really spelling out what counts as even minimal fair use makes it hard to change things for better or worse, and when a related area such as infringement law gets more codifed, it tends to drive the uncodified area into that pesky 'for worse' category just as a side effect. Just think of how much less abusive U.S. law would be if we had a lot of fair use exceptions spelled out

This is an independent ALRC review, not a Senate committee or something. The ALRC has a long history of liberalising laws where it's appropriate to do so and where other jurisdictions are making moves in that direction. I think your derision of the process is premature.

Either way though it will be a long time before we see any actual change. The ALRC reviews usually only take a year or so, but getting the government to actually enact any of their recommendations is another thing. For instance, the ALRC revi

Secondly it can bring back the right to photocopy up to 5% of a book/article for educational purposes. It usedto shit me off to no end hearing lecturers say they found some good content but couldn't give it to us because it exceeded the copying allowance.

After what seems like years of having Europe and America laugh at our foolish ISP filtering proposals, our crazy tech and content prices, maybe... just maybe, we will lead the way and have everyone cheer us instead.

Huh? After Europe opposed ACTA (and Australia signed it [wikipedia.org] without a blink) you still cheer for Australia? (maybe you should change the tone to a "booo" and let the politicians know about it).

I would suggest you to stay tuned on the next step, which is TPP [wikipedia.org] - also negotiated in secret, with a higher potential to damage the "free! free! free!". Maybe you'd feel opposed to it? If positive, let me point you to a petition to be signed [stopthetrap.net] (backed, among others, by EFF).

The NBN is already paid for with government bonds, which will return 4% to investors, however, the NBN itself will make 7% ROI, which means Australian government will pocket 3% from the exercise. Which will probably be spent on even more infrastructure. Which is a lot better than Telstra did, I think all the money they ever made went straight to Sol Trujillo's retirement fund. How on earth can you describe 3% profit as s

Let me preface this with the statement that I actually support the NBN. It's like building railways in the 1800's or highways in the 1900's. It just makes sense.

And considering we spend about $4,000 per taxpayer per year on cardiac health-services - I don't give a rats arse what it costs - it makes more sense to spend the money on the NBN than it does to spend it on general government waste (health/military/elections etc.)

But don't believe everything you read about the Labour government's estimations of finances - they are based on the following "facts":1. NBN Co. will have a (compounding) Internal Rate of Return of 7% in an industry that has been declining for the past 10 years.A statement that is predicated on the following assumptions:
2. Most consumers will he happy to get 12M/1M fibre services.
3. Consumers will keep buying a voice service to go with their data service!
4. Everybody who buys ADSL or ADSL2+ now will be happy to spend at least as much on NBN services (even though the NBN is effeciently being overbuilt by Telstra 4G that meets the needs of most consumers today).
5. Even though NBN Co only made $356,000 of their estimated $3,000,000 profit in 2012, the finances are still right on track.

And finally the last MOTHER of an assumption:6. The NBN will only cost $27bn.

So to answer your question of: How on earth can you describe 3% profit as sending Australia into debt?

Well, I think our current Labour government are a lying sack of bastards, and the only person in that party who could organise a root in a brothel is no longer a member of the party because that's exactly what they did!

Recent surveys and take up data have suggested a larger than estimated number of consumers will buy the higher speed plans.

3. Consumers will keep buying a voice service to go with their data service!

This bit I doubt, even the best consumer VOIP services in Oz are mediocre (I say this as a Node customer, internet service great, VOIP service severely lacking) as most Australians are using their mobile as their main phone and eschewing land lines

Internal Rate of Return of 7% in an industry that has been declining for the past 10 years.

Internet service providers appear to be thriving and expanding instead of declining and the mobile telcos are not in a decline. The entire bleeding mess that is Telstra, landlines and all, is a different thing that is mostly destroying itself so I don't think that is a valid comparison

Stephen Conroy is a douche. Never trust an Australian who doesn't drink.

Indeed- it's well known that he was kicked out of the University of Woolloomooloo for breaking rule #4 (they don't want to catch anybody not drinking). There were also moves to kick him out under rules #1, #3, #5 and #7, but he maintained he wasn't a poofter.

Strictly speaking, we don't have Fair Use at all over here.It's been a while since I read it all in detail, but we've only got very limited exemptions for legal, review and academic use. You can present a copyrighted piece and have it entered in court records if it's relevant to a trial, and you can have limited excerpts for review and academic purposes. I forget the precise amounts, we just said "no more than 10%" which was enough to keep anyone from hassling us. What we used to have instead of Fair Use wa

The file-sharing issue aside, I believe copyrights shouldn't be used like patents on ideas, where mere similarity in plot, character or overall design becomes grounds for suing the developer of another work. For instance, fanfiction should be legalised, where there's a clear distinction between the author of the original work and the author of the derivative.

On the subject of fanfiction, I saw a post in another thread (ages ago) that had a really good way of fixing this problem. As the author, release a CC-BY-NC-SA licenced "universe bible" that is specifically built to allow fanfiction. As long as your fans publish whatever they write as a derivative of that document and license it under the CC-BY-NC-SA licence, then they're legally protected. Even if the author goes all Lucas on them.

I'm drafting something like that for my own novels, but I've been snowed und

Create a fanfiction license. As long as it is not-for-profit (with a specific exemption for "posted on a site that has ads"), the fanfic author makes no claims of copyright/trademark ownership of the original characters and whatnot, and agrees to indemnify the original authors in any lawsuit over the fanfic, the fanfic author can obtain a license, at no cost, to use any trademarked or copyrighted material associated with the original work.

I don't know, I think there should be a reasonable protection for authors and their worlds/characters. For instance, Rowlings should be able to publish her Harry Potter series, without other authors spewing out "Harry Potter and the...." knockoffs between books in order to capitalize on her work. Although I agree copyright shouldn't be used for those purposes - the correct tool, I think, is a trademark.

And I imagine it'd be pretty easy for a piece of fan fiction, which is generally distributed for free, di

Back in the 90s when Star Trek DS9 and Babylon 5 were going head-to-head in the syndication market, their respective companies handled fanfiction and sites VERY differently:

- Paramount issued cease-and-desist letters to webowners and fans (else they would be prosecuted).

- Meanwhile PTEN (offshoot of Warner Bros) asked JMS how he thought fans of Babylon 5 should be handled. They decided fans would be free to use B5 images and characters, so long as a copyright notice was immediately underneath or ahead of t

On another note: It seems studios have no qualms about stealing ideas from others. Ever notice how many movies/TV shows arrive, in the same year, with the same concept? DS9/B5. Armageddon/Deep Impact, The Illusionist/Prestige, ANTZ/A Bug's Life, Mission to Mars/Red Planet, Dante's Peak/Volcano.

It makes it hell on those of us who confuse them. "Let's go see the meteor movie" "The Bruce Willis one, or the other one" And I still don't know anyone who can tell Mission to Mars and Red Planet apart from name alone. I've managed to convince more than one person that Mission to Mars stars Val. And wasn't the Ice Cube/Natasha Henstridge Ghosts of Mars also right about the same time? One ET (Abyss wannabe), one survival movie more about a feral robot than anything else, and one video game-esq movie.

Let's get the misconceptions out of the way, then, with a short lecture on copyright law. IANAL, but I've done the research repeatedly over the past few decades. I apologize in advance for the length of the post.

Copyrights (like patents) are not broad prohibition against anything kinda-sorta similar. You cannot have copyright protection on an overall plot, plot elements, or even the exact progression of events for characters with specific personalities.

As an Australian and as a rights holder (who supports CC, fair use, fanfiction, parody/satire, etc) who sees the constant encroachment of the MPAA/RIAA/etc into our legal system, this is only going one way.

Considering that now publications are now going digital and over the next 30 years we will see a lot of new literature published to digital media that won't be available to print, I'd say it's downright dangerous not to expand Fair Use to protect the availability of literature in digital formats.

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. "The availability of literature" is not in question, is it? You pay the rights holder what he asks for his work, it's available. Or is there some subtle point about your right to things that don't belong to you that I'm missing?

Fair use means that you are allowed to use copyrighted material for free in certain circumstances, such as education and news reporting (subject to limitations on how much you copy, etc). If these laws for whatever absurd reason don't cover digital media, then that's a major problem. A particular problem is if Australia has a DMCA-like anti-circumvention law, which makes it illegal to break DRM, regardless of whether one has a fair-use claim to the protected material.

...one that's balking at climate change, grudgingly promising not stop the National Broadband Network roll out and is portraying gays and dark people asmythical job-stealing closet monsters. So while they're dragging us back to the dark ages, I can totally see them siding with a progressive view of 'fair use'.

More than likely they'll be sticking anyone caught torrenting in the stocks while dirty faced children throw vegetables at them.

Due to having to deal with Telstra the Communications Ministry is seen as a punishment post, which is why it has been populated by a string of useless arseholes and why Conroy's enemies in government are convinced that the bastard does deserve the job. Hopefully, now that Telstra isn't being run by a complete psychopath at war with government and shareholders, we'll eventually see a communications minister with enough appreciation of technical matters to be able to operate a t

The scope of the inquiry will include the impact of legislative solutions and their consistency with Australia’s international obligations and government reviews and their recommendations, such as the Convergence Review.

Just in time for ACTA (without the EU) and TPP to be finalized. How convenient.